Citrinitas

The Missing Fourth Colour

The Greek alchemical corpus describes four stages, not three: melanosis, leukosis, xanthosis and iosis. The yellow is the one that went missing. In Latin it is citrinitas, and across the later medieval and Renaissance literature it quietly falls out of use until it has been absorbed into the stages on either side. Jung noticed the omission and did not think it trivial.

It sits between the white and the red, and its nature is given by that position. The albedo is lunar, reflected light. The rubedo is solar in the full sense. Citrinitas is the transition: not the sun at noon, but the sun coming up. A fifteenth-century treatise at the centre of this tradition is named for exactly that moment, the Aurora Consurgens, the rising dawn, edited by Marie-Louise von Franz as the companion volume to Jung's Mysterium Coniunctionis.

What Returns at Dawn

• Preference. You want things again. Small things at first, and specific ones.
• Irritation. Something annoys you and you feel it rather than observe it. Irritation requires investment.
• Direction. The clarity acquires a vector. You begin to know what should be done, and the sense is yours.
• The capacity to be wrong. Reflection makes no errors because it has nothing at stake. Having a stake again brings risk back.

Most people who reach this point hold a three-stage map in which white is followed by red. So when wanting and caring return, they conclude that their equanimity was fake and they have relapsed. That is not a relapse. It is the yellowing.

The Danger: Premature Authority

The first thing a psyche generates, given the chance, is a system: a certainty, a framework that explains everything, an identity as someone who has understood. After a long period in which nothing was yours, the first thing that is yours arrives with tremendous force. People come out of the white stage and start teaching, or adopt a total position, or make the large irreversible decision the clarity seems to demand.

The light is genuine. It is also early. The tradition's instruction is the whole discipline of this stage: dawn is not noon. Let the light strengthen before you act on it. The perception that arrives now will still be there in six months, and by then you will see what surrounds it.

The Episodes

Arc III of THE GREAT WORK, a twenty-four part series that follows the operations of the opus in order, each episode written from the primary sources.

13. Citrinitas — The Stage Almost No One Talks About
14. Never Trust the First Light
15. Cauda Pavonis
16. Sublimatio
17. The Yellow Dawn
18. Solve et Coagula

Reading for This Stage

Also on This Stage

• The Magnum Opus: The 4 Stages of Inner Transformation
• Imaginatio: The Alchemical Power of the Mind (Jung)

Questions

What is citrinitas?

Citrinitas, or yellowing, is the stage between the albedo and the rubedo in the four-stage version of the alchemical Great Work. It is the dawn, when reflected lunar clarity begins to become light that is generated by the person themselves.

Why do most accounts list only three alchemical stages?

The Greek corpus described four colours. Later Latin writers dropped the yellow, partly because it is a gradient that is hard to isolate, and partly because a transition with no signature experience is hard to tell as a story.

What is the danger of the citrinitas stage?

Premature authority: building a system, a certainty or an identity on the first light that appears, and acting on it at dawn as if it were noon.

Sources: C.G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (CW 12) and Mysterium Coniunctionis (CW 14); Marie-Louise von Franz, Alchemy (1980) and Aurora Consurgens (1966); Edward F. Edinger, Anatomy of the Psyche (1985); Rosarium Philosophorum (Frankfurt, 1550). This page is educational and historical. It is not medical or psychological advice.